Strontium looks to lift your computing experience with the new low-cost HAWK Series. This is the first time we've published a SandForce based drive with Hynix 26nm flash. This is also our first public outing with FW 5.0.4. Many firsts today, this will be interesting.

We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: AVADirect, GIGABYTE, LSI, Corsair and Noctua.

You can read more about TweakTown's Storage Product Testing Workstation and the procedures followed to test products in this article.

In order to fully utilize SATA III you need a system with native SATA III support. P67, Z68, Z77 and X79 systems are preferred, but AMD has made advances in their newer SATA III systems as well. Older X58 systems with Marvell based SATA III ports do not deliver the same high levels of performance, so we recommend newer systems when available.

ATTO Baseline Performance

Version and / or Patch Used: 2.34

ATTO is used by many disk manufacturers to determine the read and write speeds that will be presented to customers.

So much for Strontium's low performance claims on the HAWK spec sheet. In our baseline testing with ATTO we pulled a 558MB/s read speed and nearly 535MB/s write speed. I'd bet SK Hynix or Strontium tested their drive and then took data for the spec sheet in a degraded state with TRIM broken.

It makes me laugh when some reviewers say the firmware doesn't make a performance difference.